Kennedy Krieger Institute Uses ABA to Help Children with Autism Disorders

In Autistic children, families find a ray of hope from Kennedy Krieger Institute  APP.com/Asbury Park Press writer Shannon Mullen tells how the Kennedy Kreiger Institute uses ABA to help children with autism disorder and other behavioral and intellectual disabilities. The article features Alex Deluca a 13 year old autistic boy who was treated at the Kennedy Kriege Institute for serious behavioral problems including banging his head  so hard that he left gaping holes in walls. Public schools and a private autism school were unable to help Alex but his parents finally found help for him at the Kennedy Krieger Institute which uses ABA treatment and trains the parents to use ABA to help Alex and other seriously challenged children:

“The intervention involves teaching a whole new set of skills,” said Dr. Louis P. Hagopian, a psychologist and research scientist at Kennedy Krieger. “Part of it is teaching the child, but the other part is teaching the parent what to do.”

The institute’s approach is based on the principles of applied behavior analysis, or ABA, which is the science of human behavior. The parental training is “performance-based,” meaning parents have to master the techniques, with 90 percent accuracy, before they can bring their children home.

“They don’t fix him there,” said Bobbie Gallagher of Brick, a behavior consultant for New Horizons in Autism, a Neptune-based agency, who is overseeing the home therapy Alex receives almost every day. Gallagher’s son Austin, 18, spent 4 months at Kennedy Krieger.

“It’s not like he had a tumor removed, and now he’s all better,” she said. “They give you a plan to work on.”

Alex’s plan divides his entire day, at home and at school, into alternating blocks of time, during which he is either expected to follow instructions or allowed to do something he enjoys, such as listening to his MP3 player or watching videos.

Because of Alex’s language limitations, his parents, teachers and therapists wear color-coded laminated cards around their necks to indicate which set of rules are in effect: green for “Alex’s way,” red for “our way.” The ABA approach also uses tangible rewards to keep children motivated. Alex’s include MP3 time, Gummi bears and chocolate-covered pretzels.

His mother has to record virtually everything he does during the day in a binder that Gallagher and his therapists use to spot problems and track his progress.

“It’s difficult, still, because this is what I have to do every day of my life, but I definitely have more control over him,” said Mennicucci, 34, who no longer has to pad herself like a football player when she is around her son."

ABA has been confirmed repeatedly for decades as the most evidence based effective intervention for autism in studies and reviews by credible health and education organizations from the US Surgeon General to state agencies in New York, California and Maine to the American Academy of Pediatrics.  Still ABA is criticized by persons and organizations who are for the most part ill informed about ABA and often have an ideological or self interest reason motivating their criticisms.  The stories of people like Alex and his parents are important to show the real life help that ABA can provide to children with autism and other serious intellectual and behavioral disabilities.  

Autism Likely Caused By Interplay of Immune, Genetic and Environmental factors

Following is the link to an abstract of an article, Antibodies against fetal brain in sera of mothers with autistic children, published in the February issue of the Journal of Neuroimmunology

and the media release translating it into ordinary language for us mortals which implicates the mother's immune system as a possible contributing factor in causing autism.

Lead investigator Harvey Singer, M.D., director of pediatric neurology at John Hopkins Children's Center, stresses that autism is a complex condition caused by an interplay of immune, genetics and environmental factors. Further studies are needed to confirm that particular antibodies do indeed cross the placenta and cause damage to the fetal brain.

Autism's Origins: Mother's Antibody Production May Affect Fetal Brain BALTIMORE, Feb. 25


(AScribe Newswire) -- The mothers of some autistic children may have made antibodies against their fetuses' brain tissue during pregnancy that crossed the placenta and caused changes that led to autism, suggests research led by Johns Hopkins Children's Center investigators and published in the February issue of the Journal of Neuroimmunology.

The causes of autism, a disorder manifesting itself with a range of brain problems and marked by impaired social interactions, communication disorders and repetitive behaviors, remain unknown for an estimated 90 percent of children diagnosed with it. Genetic, metabolic and environmental factors have been implicated in various studies of autism, a disorder affecting 1 in 150 U.S. children, according to estimates by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"Now our research suggests that the mother's immune system may be yet another factor or a trigger in those already predisposed," says lead investigator Harvey Singer, M.D., director of pediatric neurology at Hopkins Children's.

Researchers caution that the findings needn't be cause for alarm, but should be viewed instead as a step forward in untangling the complex nature of autism.

Mostly anecdotal past evidence of immune system involvement has emerged from unusual antibody levels in some autistic children and from postmortem brain tissue studies showing immune abnormalities in areas of the brain. Antibodies are proteins the body makes in response to viruses and bacteria or sometimes mistakenly against its own tissues. Yet, the majority of children with autism have no clinical evidence of autoimmune diseases, which prompted researchers to wonder whether the antibodies transferred from mother to child during pregnancy could interfere with the fetal brain directly.

To test their hypothesis, the research team used a technique called immunoblotting (or Western blot technology), in which antibodies derived from blood samples are exposed to adult and fetal brain tissue to check whether the antibodies recognize and react against specific brain proteins.

Comparing the antibody-brain interaction in samples obtained from 100 mothers of autistic children and 100 mothers of children without autism, researchers found either stronger reactivity or more areas of reactivity between antibodies and brain proteins in about 40 percent of the samples obtained from the mothers of autistic children. Further, the presence of maternal antibodies was associated with so-called developmental regression in children, increasingly immature behaviors that are a hallmark of autism.

While the findings suggest an association between autism and the presence of fetal brain antibodies, the investigators say further studies are needed to confirm that particular antibodies do indeed cross the placenta and cause damage to the fetal brain.

"The mere fact that a pregnant woman has antibodies against the fetal brain doesn't mean she will have an autistic child," Singer says. "Autism is a complex condition and one that is likely caused by the interplay of immune, genetic and environmental factors."

Researchers are also studying the effect of maternal antibodies in pregnant mice. Preliminary results show that the offspring of mice injected with brain antibodies exhibit developmental and social behaviors consistent with autism.

Senior author on the study: Andrew W. Zimmerman, M.D., of the Center for Autism and Related Disorders at the Kennedy Krieger Institute.

Co-authors: Christina Morris and Colin Gause, both of Hopkins; Pam Gillin of the Kennedy Krieger Institute; and Stephen Crawford, Ph.D., Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The study was funded by the Alliance for Autism Research.

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CONTACT: Ekaterina Pesheva, Johns Hopkins Children's Center, 410-516-4996, pager 410-283-1966, epeshev1@jhmi.edu

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